


Operation Hera

by Dr_Roslin



Series: Strength In Pain; Or That One Time Laura Roslin Brought Them to Earth and They Didn't Stay [2]
Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003), Battlestar Galactica - All Media Types
Genre: Awkward Conversations, Earthlings Aren't Very Nice, Explicit depiction of the destruction of the Colonies, Explicit discussions of genocide, Explicit discussions of mortality, Explicit discussions of the Fall, F/M, Frakking cancer, Historical context of the beginning of Battlestar Galactica, Mentions of Cancer, No Pregnancy, Safe to Read if Triggered by Pregnancy, The Author Regrets Everything, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-02
Updated: 2020-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:07:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27407818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dr_Roslin/pseuds/Dr_Roslin
Summary: To be clear, this is going to make almost no sense if you don't read the first part of the series, "Strength In Pain: Or That One Time Laura Roslin Brought Them To Earth And They Didn't Stay."  https://archiveofourown.org/works/23262691You should ABSOLUTELY read that first.Think of it as an AU for my AU, or like a deleted scene for that work, slotting in somewhere around chapter 6.That being said, I like it, so I hope you do, too.
Relationships: Laura Roslin & Original Character, William Adama/Laura Roslin
Series: Strength In Pain; Or That One Time Laura Roslin Brought Them to Earth and They Didn't Stay [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2002384
Kudos: 3





	Operation Hera

**Author's Note:**

> To be clear, this is going to make almost no sense if you don't read the first part of the series, "Strength In Pain: Or That One Time Laura Roslin Brought Them To Earth And They Didn't Stay." https://archiveofourown.org/works/23262691
> 
> You should ABSOLUTELY read that first.
> 
> Think of it as an AU for my AU, or like a deleted scene for that work, slotting in somewhere around chapter 6. 
> 
> That being said, I like it, so I hope you do, too.

I’m not sure exactly what I’d expected, but this wasn’t it. When my contact in NATO had contacted me two days ago, it had been clear that this would be an unusual experience, and yet-

‘President Roslin,’ I greeted her as I walked into the room more slowly than I’d meant to, shocked at what I saw.

The alien representative had seemed so vital, so alive when she’d appeared on television all those months ago. Her cancer had been common knowledge even then, the Colonials had never hidden it, but the implication had been that she was undergoing treatment and that the prognosis was hopeful. This - Looking at the woman sitting in the bed in front of me, her skin made of parchment and her bare skull hidden under a colourful scarf, the truth was obvious. She wasn't fighting cancer, no, there was no fighting to be done here. She’d already lost.

A ghostly hint of a smile crossed her face, still beautiful, as if the extreme weight loss had only made her delicate bone structure more obvious.

‘Come in, please. Trust me when I tell you I’m not contagious.’

I felt my own face flush as I awkwardly made my way into the room. Of course, she wasn’t, it was cancer, not the bubonic plague, and given my intimate experience with the disease, I knew that cancer patients often felt as though they were seen as contaminated, even when among their closest friends and family members.

‘Forgive me for staring, Madame President,’ I managed to get it out, aware she was still looking at her with that wry amusement though I could almost feel her fatigue from across the room. ‘It’s just that you and your people have never been what I’ve expected.’

That was the understatement of the century.

‘Really? I’d always thought these lights made my face look a tinge… green.’

I laughed softly, appreciating her quiet humour as always.

‘It’s true. Though you Colonials do seem quite a bit taller than we would have expected.’

Roslin smiled again. ‘For the most part, yes. Please. Come in. Have a seat.’

I sat awkwardly, aware I was staring, as I introduced myself. They hadn't told me much, about Roslin, about what they wanted me to do here, so it was easier to take a few minutes as I struggled to compose myself.

I found myself with vainly that I could draw, at least more than the stickmen I used to when I was entertaining my nephews. She made a picture, did the long-suffering President of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol. Propped up by pillows, she was sunlight against the sterile blandness of the hospital room, devoid as it was of any windows and lit by fluorescent lights, only reinforced by her pallor. The only colour in the room was the green scarf which covered her bare scalp, although I knew from the pictures the Colonials had released that her hair had once been rich and full, a full lustrous auburn, a colour of which the wig she'd worn had not done justice.

It was apparent that the Colonials were no more adept at fighting cancer than we were.

‘You still don’t have a notepad,’ she pointed out looking at my bare hands, clenched in my lap, and for a second I thought she had read my mind before realizing that she was merely reminding me of my purpose here.

‘No,’ I said softly, unwilling to dwell on the reason why I’d been forbidden to bring pen or paper into the room with me, why, in fact, the only thing I was allowed to bring in were the clothes I was wearing. ‘They've told me I'll get a transcript of our conversations.’

This time the smile was a bit twisted.

‘Of course. Sometimes I forgot that they’re recording everything I say. Or do. I’m sorry we don’t have more time. I tried to get them to call you to come in earlier when I had more..’ she paused, and for a split second I was afraid she was going to say _time_ ‘….stamina.’

I almost laughed.

'No one thinks of calling for a historian. I always wonder why. They always think we’re stuck in the past.’

‘They always expect teachers to be sheltered. And they walk in expecting you to snap a ruler over their knuckles.’

I snorted.

‘Is that a thing where you’re from as well? My parents’ generation tells those kinds of stories, but I’m never been entirely sure they were true.’

She eased back into the pillows, seeming to relax a bit.

'No, it’s true, where I come from, though it was more common a hundred years ago. Still. The reputation holds,’ she laughed quietly. 'In fact, the first time I met Adama, I had the strongest urge to give his knuckles a rap.’

‘Adama? Admiral Adama?’

I had the hardest time imagining anyone having the gall to treat the Colonial military leader in such a cavalier manner. As far as I could tell, the man had been carved from granite.

‘He was Commander Adama then.’ She smiled again. ‘How we ever managed to work together long enough to make it out of the system, I swear I still don’t know. We almost strangled each other on sight.’

Well, that fit with what I would have expected. There was a longstanding tradition of distrust between military and civilian leaders on Earth, so it made sense it would have been the same on the Colonies of Kobol, given human nature. Still.

‘You must have come to some sort of understanding, given that you made it all the way here.’

This time I couldn’t read her expression. There was sadness there, and purpose, and joy.

‘It took a very long time, and there were certainly missteps along the way. But yes. That we did.’

They’d asked me to pursue this line of inquiry if I could, and though I hadn’t expected it to come this naturally, I decided to go with it, as in fact, I’d long decided to let this entire conversation. And truth be told, I'd long wanted to know.

‘People who work together as closely, as you must have, for extended periods of time, particularly under great stress. They must become quite close.’

‘That’s been my experience.’

As she tilted her head to look at me, I saw the schoolteacher, the lifelong learner as we both lost ourselves in a line of inquiry.

‘I’ve often been envious of Adama’s crew, the way they fought for each other, the way they’d formed a family to fight for, to live for, while the rest of us had to form new lives even as we ran.’

I tried desperately to find the words How could I phrase this, how could I put this, so she wouldn’t freeze me out completely?

‘You never felt…’ I fumbled for my words. It was something I’d wondered, something that had stuck in my head since the limited briefing I’d had coming in since the Colonials had made their presence known. Something I couldn't help but wonder ‘…given how much time you spent with them… what you went through together…’

‘That I might be welcomed into that family as well?’ The sadness was back. ‘Sometimes. With – some of them.’

Adama, maybe? His son? Or maybe the young blonde pilot who’d escorted her down for the prisoner exchange? There had been something almost maternal about the way she'd treated that young pilot. Shaking my head slightly, I tried to refocus, taking a step back emotionally as I could see that pushing her would get me nowhere.

‘You lost your family? On - ?’

Frantically I ran through my mental files, trying to remember which Colony she was from, originally. Damn it. Why did there have to be so many of them?

‘ – the Colonies?’ I finished lamely, trying to cover my faux pas.

‘Caprica,’ she told me quietly, taking pity of me. ‘And yes, I did, though not the way you’re thinking. It happened long before the Fall. They were long gone, even before the Cylons came back. My father and sisters, in a car accident, years ago and my mother years before. Breast cancer.’

I winced. Cancer ran in families, as in my case, and ran in specific places, mainly due to environmental factors. Also in my case. I could only imagine what it must be like to see yourself dying of the same disease that had killed your mother.

‘I would be terrified,’ I blurted out.

Again, that sad smile.

‘Yes. I was. I am. I’m ashamed to say that from time to time I worried more about my own fate than that of what it would take to get my people here.’ She paused before continuing, ‘although thanks to the Cylons, we were usually too caught up in a shared sense of sheer terror.’

‘Yet, they say that there were those, Cylon, who chose to live among you, were welcomed by you, by the time you arrived here. As citizens, the same as humans.’

No one had ever seen the Cylons of which they spoke, though we’d been immediately curious as to what they looked like. What they were like. It had been true since the alien fleet had arrived months ago. It was certainly something I'd never expected to experience. The sense of awe, and panic, as an armada of alien ships arrived in orbit, hailing us, on our doorstep. With not only humans on board, but also, apparently, an assortment of other aliens and sentient machines who’d banded together, despite their past hatreds, to forge an alliance to make it this far.

‘I’ve never seen one. A Cylon. No one has.’

They’d been very careful about that.

She smiled sadly.

‘No.’

‘But you’ve said they’re among you. That they have full citizenship. Gained complete equality, despite everything. Even perhaps among your leadership.’

Not that we’d ever been able to get them to answer that question one way or another, as they were apparently concerned we might try to find out whether that was true. Whether we could perhaps find one, in their representatives that had made the trip planetside. And do what with them? No one had ever said, but I'd long personally thought the Colonials were right, to be so protective of their allies, given the nature of human history. 

‘Yes.’

‘Despite everything you’ve said they’ve done. The murder of billions of innocents? Despite the fact they left their home to attack you, to take over your homeworlds, to root and kill and burn?’

I couldn’t imagine it, but she waited quietly until I finished the question, saddened again by the look in her eyes.

‘Is that why you're here? That's what you wanted to ask?’

I winced.

‘Well, yes…’ but, also ‘what was it like? How did they differ from you, from us? Why have we never met them? Especially if they’ve gained full equality, shouldn’t they be among your leadership?’

_Wait… where they really among their leadership? Had there really been aliens, or rather, additional aliens, on Earth?_

Had they come to Earth? Which one? The handsome man with the long brown hair, their key scientist, the one they called Gaius Baltar? The striking blonde who was his constant companion? Or maybe Lee Adama, the Vice-President? He was second only to Roslin as far as they could tell, and we'd only Adama’s word, and that of the rest of the Colonials, that the man was his son.

It could drive one crazy, wondering, trying to figure out who was human and who… wasn’t. It was one reason we all found the presence of the Colonials so disturbing. That and their refusal to answer any and all questions about how their technology worked, about Cylon biology, about the full extent of their history, about how they'd made it this far… well, to answer anything really.

‘Who says they aren’t?’ She looked at me, waiting, assessing, judging my reaction.

‘But – then?’

‘Maybe we just knew we would have to protect them.’

‘From us? But – why would you want to protect them anyway? I mean, I know you said you had to work with them to survive, that your relationship evolved, but I figured…. How can you not hate them?’

‘Who says I don’t?’

Looking at her now, I saw it, the sadness. And the anger.

‘They killed everyone I’d ever met. Anyone I’ve ever known. Other than those I brought with me, they killed everyone I had left. If it hadn’t been for the _Galactica_ , if it hadn’t been for the decommissioning ceremony, if it hadn’t been for my boss being so angry at me, for him sending me there, I’d be dead. Even that, even the family I’d formed after the Fall, they tried to take from me. This war, this run, what it took, drained everything from all of us, took everything from us, and failed to turn us all into a shell of our former selves only by our sheer will.’

She paused for a minute, and I wondered for a moment, for a long moment, if she would go on, but she did, finally, so softly at first that I could barely hear it.

‘They didn’t get my family, they couldn’t, they were already dead, through sheer human stupidity, and they didn’t get my son. They got his whole family, his parents and his sisters, their children. All of them, until there was only him. Maybe that’s why we connected so quickly, my Billy, why he adopted me, in those first few weeks we spent running. We weren’t alone in that experience, in the sudden loss of our entire families, but yet, it bonded us together, the experience of our complete and total loss. Our whole families. Gone. Nothing. No one left but us.’

She smiled, but this time, for a brief instant I saw the joy, glimpsed for a moment a woman would have seemed much younger than her years, whose sheer joy would have to be contagious.

‘Despite everything, the two of us,’ she laughed, and I saw her again, the young woman under the death mask. When it slammed back into place, its return only made its sharp edges that much more pronounced.

‘He died on the floor,’ she continued softly, and it hurt more than if she had been openly sobbing, ‘on the floor of a cheap bar, alone, bleeding out in front of strangers. No, the Cylons didn’t get him. We did that, humans. Stinking, bloody humans. In his case, by a woman driven mad by anger and grief and the need for revenge. So forgive me, if I find it easier to forgive the Cylons sometimes, than I do my fellow humans.’

She laughed angrily. ‘Forgive me. I’m dominating the conversation. It’s only… It was never the same. After he died. It was hard for me, after that. Harder, I guess I should say. Adama – the Admiral - had to remind me more often afterward that I had to bend if I didn’t want to break.’

‘It sounds like good advice.’

‘It was. I couldn’t always take it though.’

She fell silent a moment more, and I wondered again at the two of them, their relationship, all those things they were careful not to say on those calls between the President of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol and the Admiral of the Fleet. We knew little, about that mysterious man with the gravelly voice that almost no one on the planet had ever seen, who stayed in orbit and was so deferential during the calls to his superior and so abrupt to everyone else... Even though the other Colonial representatives had received a significant degree of media attention, Roslin had fascinated everyone on Earth since the Fleet's unexpected arrival. (Though her presumptive successor, Adama the Younger as I privately thought of him, certainly gave her a run for her money, especially after that footage leaked of him in nothing but a towel.)

Adama the Elder, though, had stayed discreetly in the background, which seemed to indicate that their political protocols were similar to those of Earth’s democracies, with a military officially and distinctly subordinate to its civilian leaders. The way the Colonial representatives spoke of Adama however, sometimes made me wonder. In addition, Roslin’s attitude towards him eluded me, eluded everyone, and it had become a subject of extreme curiosity. Call it human nature, this extreme nosiness into their private relationship, or call it something else, we just couldn’t leave it alone.

‘You’re close then.’

That was a given. They would have to be, given the nature of their roles, their joint responsibilities, the sense of isolation they must share, the long hours they would have had to have put in together. After all that, She would have to either hate him or trust him to the end of the universe, there wasn't really a third option.

‘Umm.’

I waited, hoping for more and hoping that she would rush to fill the awkward silence, give me something. The people who’d brought me here had all been keen on my pushing for a response to this question. Maybe they were as nosy as I was. Or maybe they were looking for something else. Leverage, maybe? Or just the obsessive need for background context?

It seemed, though, that Roslin had more patience than I. That, or she’d been playing the game for longer than I.

‘It won’t work.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Whatever their game is. Whatever they’re planning. It won’t work.’

‘Madame President –’

‘You don’t know us, either,’ she paused a moment, this time long enough for me to catch up. ‘Good, that’s very good.’

‘President Roslin, believe me – ’

‘Oh, child. I’ve been down here for weeks. They tell me the wireless is ‘spotty’, though it's never been a problem before. I only see whom you let me see and every time I mention going outside, these mysterious threats keep conveniently reappearing. Oh, and other than you, I haven’t seen another civilian. That’s why they sent you, isn’t it? A friendly face to soften me up?’

‘Ah…’

Fuck. I hadn’t thought of it that way until that very moment, and I was stunned for a moment by my own stupidity.

‘You’ve met with every high-ranking official on the planet,' I began softly, trying to work it out step by step. 'Every political leader, every Head of State…’ 

‘Hmm. I did, didn’t I? And yet, where are they? While I'm stuck down here?’

‘The threats – ’

‘Yes, those mysterious threats that no one has quite verified. From your nativist extremists. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure they exist, but that’s not the reason I’m down here. It's amazing, really, how those threats only became a concern after we made it clear we weren’t going to had over unfettered access to our technology.’

‘Come on. There have been threats, from the moment you arrived. You know that.’

‘Yes. And the entire time your leaders assured me they would take the necessary precautions. Only now, they find they can’t quite do that anymore. Did the terrorists suddenly become incredibly proficient? Face it,’ she said, looking straight at me, ‘they provide a convenient excuse for what they want.’

‘Meaning you're, what, a hostage? Really?’

‘Meaning I’m leverage. I always have been.’

She laughed at me a moment, the bitterness leaking through. ‘Should tell you, though. To be leverage, you have to have value.’

‘Your Fleet isn’t going to just leave you behind.’

‘They’re not? How reassuring.’

I stopped to stare. Her voice, her tone, bone dry, a wry humour underlying it.

_Was it possible?_

‘…No.’

One of the things I’d noticed about the Colonials in the discussions of their future was the emphasis they'd put on loyalty.

And she was the President of the fucking Colonies, for fuck’s sake. 

‘They’re not leaving you.’

I wanted to make it a statement, but even to my ears, it came out limp. They wouldn’t. She was - Was that why everyone was so determined to suss out the nature of her relationship with Adama…?

‘You don’t seem that sure.’ 

She merely smiled and suddenly I wanted to shake her. She was dying. That was the one thing she’d never tried to hide, from us, from everyone, and now she was telling me…

‘You’ve - the ships, I mean - only just arrived. And you barely made it. Limped into the solar system, as you put it. The Last Oasis.’

That’s how Lee Adama had put it, during the one media interview he and Roslin had done together. Back when United Nations authorities had been willing to let them do public interviews.

‘There’s nowhere else for you to go.’

This I knew.

‘Your last chance is here, with us. The nearest habitable planet, if you could find one, you must know, it would have to be light-years away. You’d never make it. You barely made it, here.’

‘True. We barely made it here.’

What wasn’t she telling me?

‘The hell aren’t you telling me?’

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, I didn't hate this. 
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Also, please let me know if I'd missed a tag.


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